100% agree and it's nice to hear you're exercising your right as a consumer by boycotting Mailchimp. Having said that, can't Mailchimp do whatever they want? They're a company with their own set of rules and priorities. Seems fine to me as long as they disclose it to customers.
I think those are two separate issues: Google has positioned itself to be the lifeline of the open internet and have profited tremendously from it. With that comes a responsibility to not censor content. Otherwise it stops being the "open" internet and becomes another walled garden with dubious rules that can change at any moment (e.g. Facebook).
Mailchimp can do whatever they want, I agree, but as their customer I wouldn't expect them to censor me in any way. They have built a very profitable business on top of a free protocol. Deciding to censor how people communicate through that protocol seems unfair.
I genuinely can't fathom this argument at all and it seems rather widespread in these parts.
For one thing I'll keep strongly objecting to the use of "censorship" for something as mundane as this. It's a strong word, a private company saying that you can't do X or Y on its own turf is not censorship. If you tag the walls of a McDonalds and you get thrown out it's not censorship. If you're using Mailchimp and they say "we don't want to deal with that anymore" it's not censorship. If they based their decision on race, sexual orientation or religion it might be discrimination but Bitcoin is not officially a religion yet.
For systems that have a quasi-monopoly or a very dominant position such as Youtube it's true that it can be a problem. Not being able to post your videos on Youtube will probably reduce visibility a lot. That's still not a free-speech issue though, it's a monopoly/lack of competition issue. The solution isn't to force Youtube to host your content, it's to work on having competition in the video hosting space.
In this case though it makes no sense. Email is an open infrastructure, anybody can start sending emails whenever they want. You don't have to ask anybody for permission, setup postfix on some dedicated server and mail away.
It's a strong word, a private company saying that you can't do X or Y on its own turf is not censorship
It absolutely is censorship. They may have every legal right to do it, but at the end of the day, they are restricting broad categories of speech, it's censorship, end of story.
Furthermore, "your own turf" never is and never has been a carte blanche to do anything you want - certain regulations and obligations, both moral and legal, kick in when you open a business to the public.
Not if you don't want to deal with antispam bullshit, you don't. Try spinning up a new server, do the usual PTR/DMARC/SPF dance, and send any large quantity of messages in an automated fashion - like a regular mailing list that people have affirmatively indicated they want. Many of them simply will not get there.
If this were not a problem, Mailchimp and friends wouldn't have a reason to exist. The reason I call this censorship is because your options for large-quantity emailing are to sign up with a company like this (and subject yourself to their terms), or just deal with the fact that many of your messages will never arrive.
> Not if you don't want to deal with antispam bullshit, you don't.
The entire point of this move is part of their "dealing with antispam bullshit" service. What Mailchimp offers is not mail delivery. Anyone could provide that cheaply at near-unlimited scale. What they offer is the opportunity to piggyback on their good reputation as senders. Maintaining that reputation is necessary for the operation of the business.
> just deal with the fact that many of your messages will never arrive
This isn't quite right. It's more that your messages will be rejected at the destination.
I go through my mail once every couple of days, and I've learned to recognize "refinance with us" or "sell your house" mail by sight and throw it away unopened. Now, if I see an envelope that says (for instance) "Internal Revenue Service", I'm going to open it up. That's because of the good reputation (in a certain sense) of the sender.
The mortgage people could slap "IRS" on their mail and have a lot more people open it and read it. They would also have a number of stern, suited people come by to discuss federal law with them. But that wouldn't be censorship. It's not censorship to withhold your endorsement of someone else's communications.
Yes, if you want to send bulk email you'll need to play by the rules of the receiving servers. It's not easy but it's doable, as evidenced by the multitude of Mailchimp competitors and self-hosted systems like Sendy.
Just because it's not as easy as using `<?php mail(); ?>` doesn't mean Mailchimp has some kind of monopoly that makes their acceptable use policy the same thing as censorship.
> Not if you don't want to deal with antispam bullshit, you don't.
So, in a way, Mailchimp is actually in the business of getting around censorship in the form of spam filters?
That's where people should be directing their ire, those anti-free speech spam filters that prevent an honest businessperson from filling up their inbox with a multitude of "great offers".
Oppression in the first degree, that's what I call it...
>Otherwise it stops being the "open" internet and becomes another walled garden with dubious rules that can change at any moment (e.g. Facebook).
Or perhaps Google isn't becoming anything, it was always exactly this and people are only now waking up and looking past Google's PR. That tripe about Google being the champion of the open Internet was just good marketing that duped a lot of people. They're not a selfless group of Internet guardians and never were. Anyone who ever thought otherwise, who ever bought into their "Don't Be Evil" nonsense is a gullible mark.
More broadly, maybe this and other recent experiences might help shatter the idea that Silicon Valley and the giant tech companies are not the benevolent stewards of the global infrastructure that they paint themselves as.
Do you let anyone post under your account name? If I were to ask for your credentials to your HN account, would you give them to me and let me say whatever I want under it?
And we keep having these discussions where we all agree "It's not censorship when it's a private company" but that's starting to feel like a truism we need to push back on, because if every private company that handles mass emailing decides to stop accepting a certain type of content (let's all agree we aren't talking about child pornography as the content), that is censorship. If this story were, "T-Mobile stops allowing text messages/ phone calls about blockchain" I think the reaction would be different even though they are a private company as well.
Email is an open infrastructure, if an consensus emerges among the existing players not to allow emails about X then you're free to start your own email service what will feel the gap. If you can't make it stick then the holy free market has spoken.
Wikipedia is currently blocked in Turkey. That's censorship. Mailchimp won't let you use them to send emails about Bitcoin. That's a minor inconvenience.
If every email service prohibits a topic, that's indistinguishable from state censorship. I fail to see how only one is bad and the other isn't.
The free market isn't of any help here either. Censorship is about stopping the spread of information and ideas. What's not known can't affect the free market.
It's distinguishable because nothing stops you from starting a new email service if you want to. You're not going to end up in jail if you start an emailing service for Blockchain projects. In many countries journalists and authors do end up in jail (or worse) because of actual censorship.
If nobody wants to host your content then maybe the problem isn't them, maybe it's you. And if it's not then there's a business opportunity waiting for you right here.
Email is nominally an open infrastructure. In reality, antispam measures and companies can render you unable to send messages in general if you annoy them enough.
Spamhaus in particular seems to have a reputation for unreasonable practices and rather unpleasant-to-deal-with people.
T-Mobile isn't a good analogy because it functions as a utility and has very few competitors. MailChimp has many competitors, including "spin up your own mail server" and "use a different marketing channel".
No, they're in fact limited by the contract they present when they offer you their service and relevant laws that may supercede parts of that contract. That would include some privacy laws.
